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This appears to be a half-functioning project by an inexperienced but enthusiastic young person that has gotten way more attention and been taken more seriously

This appears to be a half-functioning project by an inexperienced but enthusiastic young person that has gotten way more attention and been taken more seriously than he imagined. I can see myself having done something like this when I was 13 or 14, meaning well and just wanting to be involved in a startup. But I think he used a bootstrap template that made the page and product look just good enough that people here are giving it a serious evaluation as a hosting business. It is clearly not ready for serious use, but it is an interesting lesson about how wide open tech is for anyone to come along and create a business.

RIMR 11y ago
Good assessment. As someone who paid for the personal plan, and watched it implode from the inside, I get the exact impression you do. The problem was the number of mistakes made: * Offering the support line as a "literal" replacement for emergency services. * Including a racial slur in a 503 page. * Falsely advertising the number of servers you can create as "Unlimited", when the limit is actually 2. * Use of a generic bootstrap theme with minimal modification. * 404'd refund and legal pages. * Not established as a LLC. * No way to manage billing profiles (in violation of Stripe TOS) * Broken and untested remix of Ubuntu Server. * No account management portal - You can't change or reset your password at all. * Advertised as a finished product for use by businesses, when it appears to have barely been tested in-house. This is how you lose your business, and then get sued into bankruptcy. This kid should be happy he just lost a couple thousand dollars in server hosting and refund fees, rather than millions and the loss of his credit reputation for life. Learn a lesson from this, would-be entrepreneurs of HN. Don't do what this kid did.
- jakejake 11y ago
  The fact that the pricing plans were taken as-is from an HTML template (that had nothing to do with hosting) is a pretty good sign that the project is a bit rough around the edges. A good lesson indeed, if you pretend to be serious and do a decent job, people are quite likely to take you seriously.

RIMR 11y ago

Good assessment. As someone who paid for the personal plan, and watched it implode from the inside, I get the exact impression you do. The problem was the number of mistakes made: * Offering the support line as a "literal" replacement for emergency services. * Including a racial slur in a 503 page. * Falsely advertising the number of servers you can create as "Unlimited", when the limit is actually 2. * Use of a generic bootstrap theme with minimal modification. * 404'd refund and legal pages. * Not established as a LLC. * No way to manage billing profiles (in violation of Stripe TOS) * Broken and untested remix of Ubuntu Server. * No account management portal - You can't change or reset your password at all. * Advertised as a finished product for use by businesses, when it appears to have barely been tested in-house. This is how you lose your business, and then get sued into bankruptcy. This kid should be happy he just lost a couple thousand dollars in server hosting and refund fees, rather than millions and the loss of his credit reputation for life. Learn a lesson from this, would-be entrepreneurs of HN. Don't do what this kid did.

jakejake 11y ago
The fact that the pricing plans were taken as-is from an HTML template (that had nothing to do with hosting) is a pretty good sign that the project is a bit rough around the edges. A good lesson indeed, if you pretend to be serious and do a decent job, people are quite likely to take you seriously.